Blog Archives

Blizzard has a fairly large content release happening with patch 7.1. While it feels too soon to be launching this much content, there are some changes worth noting.

First, remember that you can turn Blood of Sargeras into a trader and get fun things like more Starlight Rose for your flask/potion needs, or other crafting materials.

Second, remember that some of the functionality of raiding addons was broken (I’m pretty sure they didn’t reverse this decision they announced several months ago). The UI can’t tell positional space of where people are in the room. That makes things like “Spread out 5 yards” much more difficult to coordinate. There isn’t any way to do range frames, radars, nearby warnings, or arrows pointing you to another person. So, good luck with that. 😉

Restoration changes in 7.1

When you use frenzied Regen (FR) in bear form, you get a benefit from your Harmony mastery. If you sometimes use guardian affinity and pop FR in bear form, you will heal slightly more over the duration.

Ysera’s Gift sticks to party & raid members, so now you will be less likely to randomly heal people when you are standing in town.

Some of living seed’s effect was ‘nerfed’, although Living Seed didn’t contribute much to our total healing done in the first place. The artifact trait listed in the patch notes is also one of the last traits we suggest picking up, so the change to that trait doesn’t matter much. At this point in artifact progression, it will end up being less overall living seed healing done, but it did maybe 1% of anyone’s total healing in the first place.

Regrowth & healing touch baseline healing was buffed, but this isn’t documented in the patch notes (though it should go live). Regrowth crits less, but does more immediate healing. So, think of the package of changes as being a buff to the direct healing portion of regrowth rather than anything else. This might also impact the value of crit and other stats after all is said and done, but only slightly.

Swiftmend’s healing was increased slightly, likely in part due to the living seed nerf. This means that when you use swiftmend as a burst heal, it’s a tiny bit more potent. When you use swiftmend to get the Soul of the Forest (SOTF) buff, try to make sure you get a benefit from that burst heal (otherwise, the change results in even more overhealing).

They nerfed the prosperity talent, reducing the cooldown by 3 seconds instead of 5. This makes it more annoying to line up SOTF with wild growths, but still leaves the combo fairly potent.

They buffed the cultivation talent by 20%. On fights where cultivation was good, it’s now even better. This makes cultivation somewhat more helpful on raid encounters where you might have people sit at or below 60% health enough to proc cultivation. While we call the SOTF build the ‘raid’ build, there are certainly plenty of raid fights where cultivation shines.

Incarnation is off the GCD, but you still will likely value SOTF or Cultivation more.

TLDR for resto: Not much really changed in terms of how you heal. Cultivation’s value definitely increased. Most of the changes come out to a net neutral impact overall, depending on what talents you take. The living seed nerf offsets some of the buffs to the direct healing portion of spells. We’ll have a more solid idea of the impact of these changes once it hits the live servers and we know the final numbers.

Balance changes in 7.1

Not much changed for balance, just some minor tweaks.

Owlkin Frenzy now only makes Lunar Strike instant, rather than being consumed by Wrath or Lunar Flare. This is good in some ways in that you can’t accidentally ‘waste’ it now, but also gives you less flexibility in its use.

You now have regrowth instead of healing touch baseline & can cast regrowth in moonkin form. This has a faster cast time, but a pretty small initial heal. If you happened to be unlucky and got the legendary that impacted healing touch, it now impacts regrowth instead.

Incarnation no longer triggers the global cooldown and they fixed the graphical bug (big armored super moonkin Incarnation form is back!). I find myself using this some, so that’s nice.